Darknet Diaries EP 175: "Bayrob" now available

If you haven’t listened to Darknet Diaries yet, you’re missing out.

Jack Rhysider does real cybercrime stories - well researched, well produced, hard to stop listening to. Episode 175, “Bayrob”, is one of the best I’ve heard in a while.

The story starts with a fake car listing on eBay. Someone loses $8,600. FBI agent Stacy Whittaker gets the complaint in 2007. What follows is a Romanian gang - the Bayrob group - that spent the next decade running a botnet of 450,000 machines, mining crypto on victims’ hardware, selling stolen credit cards on AlphaBay, and pulling in at least $4 million total. Their opsec was serious: five encryption layers on laptops, custom-flashed routers rotated weekly, directional Wi-Fi antennas to piggyback stolen networks from a mile away, kill switches for instant drive destruction.

One thing that’s stayed with me: the FBI still has encrypted cryptocurrency wallets in evidence. Multiple layers of encryption, still unbroken. Whatever Bitcoin is in there has done well since 2015.

EP 175 is 96 minutes well spent.

Happy listening! :-)

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